Apple CEO Tim Cook, via MG Siegler

I'm not going to win any genius points for making this observation, especially because I stole it from Benedict Evans, but the new iPad's 2048x1536 screen resolution presents a unique set of problems for image-heavy apps.

For those of us who remember the old days, when it was the people doing design for print who bought the extra RAM for their towers in order to handle "giant" images, it's clear that the base 16GB iPad 3 isn't going to cut it any longer.

Those 250 MB copies of WIRED you've grown fond of? A 4x increase in resolution won't translate directly to a 4x increase in file size, but I can only imagine that the folks at Adobe are furiously trying to figure out how to tamp down the file size of the magazines and ebooks their publishing system produces.

The one thing Apple's super high resolution screen won't penalize, of course, is text. And maybe app developers will fall in love with vector graphics all over again. Lord knows the tools to render gorgeous graphics with them are already right there in HTML5.

For fans of reading on these devices, it's a brand new day. As someone who has just recently discovered that the real reason some prefer the Kindle to the iPad for long reading sessions is screen resolution -- realized through the controlled experiment of discovering that reading on an iPhone 4S is also more pleasurable than an iPad 2, despite its larger screen size -- I can say with confidence that this will only accelerate the transition of reading from print to tablets.

A friend sends me a link to a 60 Minutes segment she feels it's important I watch. I'm on an iPad—not that it matters, because it's just as much a PC as  the overgrown microcomputers that go by that name—and clicking on the link lands me here:

Why, God? Why?

And that is it. That is literally the end of my interaction with this site, because my only option is to download the iPad app. There is no alternative—no way to click through to the video or text that I was after. And you know what? I'm not going to download your stupid app. Because I am not at home on my own wifi, and that would be an anti-social use of public bandwidth, not to mention the fact that this connection isn't so great, so it would probably take, for all I know, half an hour.

More importantly: Why do so many Web developers think that tablets are an excuse to break the functionality of the Web? Anyone who does this, even if it's just an interstitial ad for a tablet app, should be forced to put the following disclaimer at the top of their tablet-detecting sites:

ATTENTION USER: We know you were enjoying the frictionless access to content that is the implicit promise of a hyperlink, but we would rather you bounce off the outer berm of our walled garden, because ad rates are higher on our tablet apps or something? All we know is, somebody on the 13th floor needs to show steady growth in "engagement" on "post-PC" devices.

It feels like vandalism. This is what hackers do. So why are companies defacing their own sites? Is it really so hard to understand that the browser on a tablet device is in all important respects the equal of the browser on a laptop, and, depending on the machine, in many cases superior?

I know it's petty to rant about this sort of thing when the larger story—the death of the open Web—is the greater threat to the free exchange of information. But this particular manifestation of it—cravenly commercial and stubbornly immune to the most basic tenets of usability—is in some respects one of its most visible expressions.

Sure, it's a janky Photoshop, but you get the idea: The Atavist Platform will soon publish to more formats than any of its competitors.

The Atavist Platform for publishing enhanced ebooks is what Apple's iBooks Author program should have been. Out this spring, this Web-based tool for transforming any collection of words, images, sound, video, and other media could be the key to unlocking ebook publishing for the rest of us. Which is either the Ragnarok of traditional publishing or the dawn of a democratized, blogified new age of books-as-apps.

I got a more or less exclusive look at the Atavist Platform last week at Science Online (which is kind of like Burning Man, but for science journalists) and the ambition and potential scale of the project just about popped a blood vessel in my brain.

When Apple made its big announcement about creating software that would make it easy for anyone to publish an enhanced ebook, I tweeted that Cupertino had just dropped an H-bomb on the business model of companies like the Atavist, which currently generates a significant portion of its revenue by licensing its competing platform to publishers and other institutions.

My preview of the Atavist Platform illustrated just how wrong I was. In contrast to Apple's iBooks Author software, which will only let you publish an ebook in the iBooks store and comes with a content license so draconian it makes Dear Leader look like a doting uncle, the Atavist's solution will work for any computer with a Web browser.

The Atavist is best known as an app that sells enhanced long-form journalism, and the Atavist Platform is the company's effort to make its internal publishing content management system available to anyone.

Here's the crazy part: This system will publish any enhanced ebook you make with it to just about any platform you can imagine, including the Web. Here's a screenshot of the still-very-much-in-progress platform back-end. Check out all the options to the left of the red arrow.

Here's the full list of platforms The Atavist's consumer-facing platform will publish to:

• Kindle

• Nook

• Kobo

• iBooks

• iBooks Enhanced

• iOS App Store

• Android

• the Web

Let's put that in context: Right now Adobe and WoodWing are charging magazine publishers something like six figures just for a system that will transform their magazines into apps that can be sold through Apple. And magazines are basically just enhanced ebooks. Meanwhile, companies like OnSwipe are trying to become the de-facto system for publishing content to tablets—but only on the web. Companies like Arcade Sunshine, whom I've written about before, are also limited to Apple's App store. 

The Atavist Platform, meanwhile, promises to do all of that, and then maybe turn its competitors' bones into bread when it's done.

Granted, this isn't at all the way the folks at the Atavist characterize their business—it's just my interpretation of the disruptive potential of what they're up to. I spoke with Olivia Koski, a producer at the Atavist and one member of its tiny, five and a half person staff, and she said that "we want to make money, but we also just want to share our tool with people because we're really excited about it." Silicon Valley plans to upend every business model five minutes older than theirs and business cards drenched in status-seeking, this ain't.

The Atavist Platform is a classic example of a team coming up with a solution to their own problems and then figuring that other people might want to use it, too. The company's founders have magazine and publishing backgrounds, and include Evan Ratliff, a contributing editor at Wired, Jefferson Rabb, a programmer and designer who built sites for top-shelf authors, and Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at the New Yorker. Most people know the Atavist as a publisher of long-form journalism, and that aesthetic pervades their platform.

The Web view version of eBooks published with the Atavist Platform, which I only saw briefly, has a clean design and seems to stick to the river-of-text-plus-interstitial-multimedia format that characterizes a lot of what the Atavist has published so far.

I suspect that the Atavist's format is in a way the secret sauce of the Atavist Platform, and one of the reasons that such a small team has been able to create a system that can push to content to nearly every device you'd like. While Adobe has had to contend with publishers wanting to faithfully reproduce complicated print layouts on tablets, the Atavist is obviously committed to the text itself—hence the availability of many articles from the Atavist, sans multimedia, for a buck less as Kindle singles.

The Atavist is actively seeking beta testers for its platform, says Koski, and they can sign up at atavist.net/beta.

If the team can pull it off, it doesn't seem like the Atavist Platform will be remain limited to authors who would like to use it to sell Atavist-style enhanced eBooks and long-form articles. The system can handle a variety of content, from timelines and maps to full-page images and audio soundtracks—even custom HTML5 widgets.

"We're excited to release [our platform] out into the world because people will do things to it that we could never imagine," says Koski. Those things might include eBook versions of "Our Trip to Disney World," but that's kind of the point. When a team transitions from building tools for itself to building a platform, it's got to be easy enough for anyone to use it—just like Twitter, blogs, and every other medium that has been perfectly suited to a particular class of devices. That Twitter flourished because of the dawning of smart phones, and blogs the spread of the web, just illustrates how high the stakes are as the Atavist and its competitors jockey for position on the latest device to redefine how we consume media—the tablet.